Charlie Whelan Completely Silent on His Union’s BA Strike. Odd That.

By

Iain Martin

Feb 22, 2010 7:01 pm GMT

You can’t get my old sometime mucker Charlie Whelan off this social media malarkey. Follow him on Twitter and you get the fun Whelan take on everything from living in the Highlands to angling, his beloved Spurs, the supreme brilliance of Gordon Brown and the unremitting vileness of the PM’s enemies. My sole regret is that Whelan chooses not to swear on Twitter, which rather lessens the effect for readers.

EPA

Charlie is incredibly quick off the mark when there’s a threatening story about Gordon Brown. When the bullying allegations against his boss broke, he took up the cudgels against his old adversary Andrew Rawnsley. The journalist’s new book serialized at the weekend was full of “smears” tweeted Whelan. “Looking forward to latest fiction book by Rawnsley in the Obs this Sunday. Will be tweeting the ‘mistakes’ from his last tome soon.” Oh yes, Rawnsley’s last book — “Servants of the People” — was clearly well wide of the mark. It only revealed in full Technicolor that there was warfare between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown because the latter was annoyed that the former had dared to become prime minister instead of him! What a load of old rubbish that turned out to be, thank goodness.

But I notice that Charlie is thus far strangely silent on the other biggest story of the day. It even involves Unite, the union in which Whelan is a leading figure. From his perch as the director of Unite’s political department, he is central to keeping the union movement on side. He’s back being an unofficial adviser to his great friend Gordon Brown.

Slightly awkward news then that Unite cabin staff at British Airways are back with another annoying strike vote today. (They’ll deign to tell the traveling public which flights they’ll wreck after a meeting tomorrow morning). This is a huge potential inconvenience to passengers and not much help to a struggling BA trying to survive the effects of the downturn.

As of 6:30 tonight, nothing on this — yet — from Charlie. He must be gathering his thoughts before pronouncing? I’ll keep you posted.

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